Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why can't I write code inside my browser?

tomcritchlow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 624 posts

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#431

Post by protomyth »

jdbernard wrote: post #415
protomyth wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HyperCard, Excel, and (at the upper end) Flash are basically end-user programming that allowed for some really great creativity. I get the feeling most corporate programmers want to ban Excel and force the users to had over their code to have it properly programmed. The other two were gotten rid of. Instead of making easier and easier tools, we've gotten harder and harder. I still contend that NeXTSTEP was an easier…

> Javascript is not a beginner language anymore. Why not? You can still write vanilla JS the same way you could decades ago without much (any?) change. > It has a lot of edge cases and traps that defeat the average person. It's always had that. In fact, I think the reason it feels less like a beginner language is that the solutions we've created to handle the edge-cases and traps have been solved for professionals. I…

HyperTalk was a language that a beginner could use. Javascript is directed towards pro programmers and things that don't help the beginner like comparison and breaks in return statements.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#432

Post by flippinburgers »

user-the-name wrote: post #366
artimaeis wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, as far as I understand it originally was just short for "user". It's where home directories of users were placed. Now that it's been relegated to storing user-usable programs & data it makes sense to me that it's separate from say /Users, but I suppose it could be aliased to something like /UserProgramsAndData for verboseness and clarity to newer users. But regardless, "User System Resources" is a fairly usefu…

If you designed this from scratch, is that the name you would naturally pick?

If the naming of the path is where you are hanging the crux of your argument about how "bad" things are, then you are not making a terribly convincing argument.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#434

Post by asidiali »

1) your terminal is a browser, a system browser, basically a local, more powerful web browser - and it supports a lot more than just JS unlike other browsers only for the web

2) you operate web browsers via text commands just like a CLI - it all starts with the address/search bar. When you use your search bar to google, you are effectively typing commands into a CLI.

IMO if you can’t install some basic software like node or pip then yeah, maybe the software isn’t the issue and you just need a better fundamental understanding of what it is you’re trying to do. Plenty of people install node, every day, without issues. It’s not rocket science.

If you avoid CLIs, I don’t trust you as a software engineer, because it feels like you’re not looking for the right answer to the problem. It feels like you’re looking for the easy answer to the problem.

Part of the beauty, to me, of the CLI is like starting a painting from a blank canvas, vs a GUI being like a coloring book where you just fill in between the lines.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#435

Post by kortex »

krageon wrote: post #232
user-the-name wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely pointless knowledge they have to acquire to use the pointlessly complicated tools they do, and they confuse that with being clever. It's not. It's really not. Nothing has to be this esoteric and annoying. We've just chosen to keep things like this because we th…

The problem isn't the user-friendliness of the tools (many very friendly tools exist), it's the amount of energy the author is willing to invest (approximately none). When exposed to truly trivial tooling, the problem becomes a lack of practice in the type of thinking that leads to good programs. There we see that the core of the issue why programming isn't "easy" is that it's just not. It takes practice to get compu…

> ... it's the amount of energy the author is willing to invest (approximately none). When exposed to truly trivial tooling, the problem becomes a lack of practice in the type of thinking that leads to good programs. There we see that the core of the issue why programming isn't "easy" is that it's just not.

If PATH and installing python is a struggle for them, hoo boy, no wonder they don't feel like part of the "code club".

I merely type into my favorite search bar with auto complete

"make sure /u"

And I get:

"make sure /usr/local/bin is in your $path"

And top result is a SO spelling out what this message means and how to check.

Engineering, of any discipline, is the sum of three phases: domain research, applying that knowledge to build something, testing that thing you built. With experience, you spend less time on 1 and more on 2, but with learning software, you spend the lion's share in 1.

We still need to lower the barriers to entry. That involves teaching heuristics on how to solve problems.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#436

Post by Ajedi32 »

magicseth wrote: post #389

I feel many of the comments here are akin to saying "laying out in documents latex is hard, if you can't figure it out you're not ready to write" while the author of the article is saying "I think writing documents could be easier." Google docs is proof it's possible. Sure everyone could learn about $path with a little research but there is SO MUCH to learn to get started with a "simple" react app... It's not necessa…

> Have you never wished you could save your css tweaks directly from chrome dev tools?

FWIW, you already can. Sources -> Overrides -> Select folder for overrides.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#437

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

lionkor wrote: post #224
izacus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming COULD use a lot of simplification and removal of barriers. But still, just like you, I really hate the base attitude here. And for a different reason: I find that programmers who think like this, are also lazy when it comes to respecting the user. They're lazy when it comes to supporting accessibility. They're lazy when it somes to properly supporting i18n and making experience great for non-Americans. Th…

> Programming COULD use a lot of simplification I disagree, actually. There are plenty of languages, and even visual programming (via flow-diagrams, like Unreal Engine's "Blueprint" and Blender's shader flow diagrams), for those who just want to play around. For people who want to write a quick and dirty script, languages like python make it very easy already (relative to what they actually do). > Programming COULD u…

> There are languages and domains where the "elitism" is fully justified. If someone decides they want to write a high performance, easy to use, cross platform native application and complain about C++ or Rust being too complicated, then they should find an easier job.

I disagree. I follow a lot of game developers and you'd be hard pressed to say they don't do high-performance corss-platform native application development. They almost universally think C++ (and by extension Rust) are too complicated. They generally use C++ anyway because that's the industry standard, but they think there is definitely a conceptually less-complicated way to do things.

See: Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori, for instance. The former is so sick of C++ he's making his own programming language, and the latter routinely complains about C++'s complexity and eschews all but the simplest features of it.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#438

Post by Enginerrrd »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #355
tommilukkarinen wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you put it this way, it makes perfect sense. My first computer C64 came with Basic pre-installed and that's how an eight year old learned to code. I guess the equivalent would be, that there would a button 'code' on the browser UI, and that would lead the user onwards.

Open the Developer Console. Get cracking.

Exactly, that's what is weird about the whole premise of the article.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#439

Post by stonemetal12 »

KronisLV wrote: post #375
chme wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But isn't using the code that people smarter/more proficient than you have developed a rather good way to go about things? One big task about programming is handling dependencies and thinking about assumptions. Before even beginning to write any code, you have to think about these things: - What environment do I expect the end user uses? Are there already some libraries I can use as well installed? - Do I need a GU…

That's a fair argument to make, however i'm not sure that i'm able to entirely agree to this. > While good developers think about each one and try to find a minimal set of them. (tl;dr at the bottom, things up to "In short, " are merely my experience, which is entirely subjective) For example, suppose that i'm working on a Java project and i want to do some non-trivial operations with the filesystem. In this instance…

Your evaluation criteria left out "does new dependency conflict with any other dependency in the system". In which case a minimal set of dependencies is attractive because it reduces likely hood of conflicts and reduces effort to determine conflicts with dependencies added in the future.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#440

Post by bccdee »

lionkor wrote: post #224
izacus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming COULD use a lot of simplification and removal of barriers. But still, just like you, I really hate the base attitude here. And for a different reason: I find that programmers who think like this, are also lazy when it comes to respecting the user. They're lazy when it comes to supporting accessibility. They're lazy when it somes to properly supporting i18n and making experience great for non-Americans. Th…

> Programming COULD use a lot of simplification I disagree, actually. There are plenty of languages, and even visual programming (via flow-diagrams, like Unreal Engine's "Blueprint" and Blender's shader flow diagrams), for those who just want to play around. For people who want to write a quick and dirty script, languages like python make it very easy already (relative to what they actually do). > Programming COULD u…

To be fair, c++ is too complicated, but that's an unrelated conversation, haha.
Post reply on HN